Stand Up For Your Budget, Paul Ryan

Given the nature of partisan politics, it’s inevitable that people’s reaction to the speech President Obama gave yesterday about Paul Ryan’s budget will be not just shaped, but largely determined, by their political views—Republicans will see it as an example of what the Wall Street Journal called “dishonest political abuse” while Democrats will see it as necessary truth-telling. (Amy Davidson and John Cassidy have more on the speech.) And since my take on Ryan’s budget (which I wrote about in the magazine this week) is very similar to Obama’s, it’s hardly surprising that I fall into the latter camp. But what I really think about the speech is that even if you completely disagree with the political views that Obama enunciated in it—which were, on the whole, traditional center-liberal views about the value of government and the welfare state—you should see it as a real improvement on the way most American political debate is conducted. This was a speech that engaged directly and honestly with the positions Ryan set forth in his budget, made clear exactly where the fundamental disagreements between the two parties are located, and in effect asked voters to choose between them.

Of course, politicians always say they’re just describing their opponents’ positions, even if they are in fact offering absurd caricatures, if not outright lies. Certainly that’s what Paul Ryan says Obama was doing yesterday, which is why he called the speech “desperate and demagogic.” But while Obama’s rhetoric was, in places, designed to put Ryan in some grim company—thus the reference to Social Darwinism—the truth is that the heart of the speech was solidly grounded in the actual numbers in Ryan’s budget, and focussed almost entirely on exploring the real-world consequences of those numbers.

That’s why Ryan’s response, while completely predictable, was also disappointing. There are, after all, profound differences between the two parties when it comes to their views on budget priorities, on the relationship between taxes and economic growth, on the welfare state, and on the proper scope and scale of government. Ryan’s budget makes these differences clear. He thinks the most important thing the government needs to do at the moment is get the national debt under control. And since he does not want to cut military spending or raise taxes, getting the national debt under control means not just reforming entitlement spending (with entitlements here largely meaning Medicaid, and to a lesser extent Medicare, since he doesn’t touch Social Security), but also making deep cuts in discretionary spending.

As Obama accurately said, and as I discussed in my column, the consequences of those cuts aren’t hard to see. By 2050, funding for most of what the government does today—including everything from the F.A.A. to infrastructure spending to student aid to regulatory enforcement—would be cut by ninety-five per cent. This is not an exaggeration; it’s what the numbers in Ryan’s budget tell us. The Journal says that Obama was falsely making Republicans out to be ogres by saying that they oppose medical research, want to deny food and education to poor kids, and want to shut down air-traffic control. But whether they want to do these things isn’t the question. The point is that in voting for Ryan’s budget, they were, in fact, voting to do these things. Pointing this out isn’t demagogic. It’s honest.

Paul Ryan knows these things about his own budget. After all, he wrote it, and he commissioned the Congressional Budget Office analysis that laid out the long-term implications of his cuts. More than that, he presumably believes that the priorities he’s set out make sense. He thinks that government should restrict itself to its “core constitutional roles” (though he doesn’t explicitly explain what those are), and that it should be much smaller than it is today. He also thinks that cutting marginal tax rates, even in a time of big government deficits, will be a boon to the economy. That’s why he wrote the budget he did. And while I think this budget doesn’t reflect the views of most American voters, and that enacting it would be very bad for the U.S. economy, Ryan obviously disagrees. He thinks deep cuts in government spending on welfare programs, and major long-term reductions in spending on almost everything else government does, coupled with marginal tax cuts, will be good for America, and will put us on the “path to prosperity.” He thinks we’re better off paying down the national debt than investing in medical research or more infrastructure. This is a coherent position, and it was good that Obama faced it, and argued against it, head on. What Paul Ryan should do now is defend it.

Illustration by Christoph Niemann.

James Surowiecki is the author of “The Wisdom of Crowds” and writes about economics, business, and finance for the magazine.